5 Secrets for a Happy Ballantyne’s Day

Yes, every year we celebrate Ballantyne’s Day on February 14th with a special gift for you.

Wait, what have you been calling it? Haha.

Quick story for you…

In 1999 I started my first email newsletter. That means this is my 18th year writing to you and hundreds of thousands of other men and women around the world who want to get more done, make more money, lose weight, look great, get back in shape, and live a perfect life every day.

Along the way I discovered 5 Pillars of Success. If you have these in place you can change any area of your life. You can get a raise, build a business, improve your health, and even, if I may make such a bold claim, find the love of your life.

Yes, that’s right, you can find the love of your life, a fitting topic for Ballantyne’s Day.

Today you’re going to learn the secret to exactly how to do that, but first, let’s reveal these 5 Pillars of Success to you. Each of these pillars is explained in great detail in a free YouTube video I’ve filmed for you. Just click the link below to explore each one.

With these 5 Pillars of Success in place, you can change any area of your life.

As I walk you through how to use them to find the love of your life, you’ll also see how they can help you make more money or lose weight. I even used them to overcome my crippling anxiety attacks.

#1 – Plan & Prepare Better Than Ever Before

If you want to find the love of your life, you need to plan and prepare your social calendar better to “put your butt where your heart needs to be,” as I once heard the best-selling author Steven Pressfield say.

If you want to meet someone that shares your same values and religious faith, you plan and prepare to get more involved at church and you start telling other people that you’re looking for someone just like that.

Planning and preparation bring opportunities into your life. Then one day it’ll happen. You’ll meet someone that seems so wonderful you can’t believe how lucky you are.

Planning and preparing to find Mr. or Mrs. Right is no different than planning and preparing to build a business or lose weight.

If you want to make $100,000 a year, you can put together a detailed plan to get you there. If you want to lose 10 pounds, you can ask an expert like me for help and I’ll tell you exactly how to exercise, what to eat, show you what NOT to do, and help you plan your days so that you have a better chance for getting back in shape.

The path to success is no different when you want to find love again in your life. You plan and prepare to get lucky, because, as the old saying goes, ‘Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.’

#2 – Get Professional Accountability

If you want to find love, you need help. Fortunately, there is plenty of it out there.

You could hire a matchmaker or a dating coach, or simply sign up for a service like E-Harmony. You fill out your profile, use their research-based algorithm, and get connected to your best match. A dating coach or matchmaker also holds you accountable for making changes in your personal life so that you have a greater opportunity to find your new husband or wife.

Again, this is no different than hiring me to give you expert advice and hold you accountable if you want to lose weight or change a habit in your life.

Professional accountability gives you two things that you won’t find from anyone else in life. First, you get expert advice, and second, you get no-excuses-accepted accountability from someone that has set a high bar for your behavior.

You make a commitment and your coach holds you to it. Before you know it, you’ve made big changes in your behavior that lead to success. That’s the power of professional accountability.

#3 – Surround Yourself with Positive Social Support

Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.”

Research from Harvard University confirms this. If you spend time with overweight people, your risk of gaining weight increases. Likewise, if you spend time with smokers, you increase your odds of taking up smoking.

If you want to find a good partner in life, then you must spend time with people who have excellent marital relationships.

You must always surround yourself with good people to support your new goals in life. Spend less time with negative people that suck you into bad habits. If alcohol or other temptations ruined past relationships, you avoid social situations that promote those vices.

The same approach works for weight loss. Spend more time with positive people that support your goals and less time with negative people that want to sabotage your diet or hold you down. This might mean making new friends that want to see you succeed in life while spending less time with those that hold you back. That’s life. If you want to change, you can’t do the same things that have failed in the past.

The best news of all is that online positive social support works just as well as in-person ‘real world’ social support. That means joining our free habit change group, full of positive people, is often enough to be the social support you need to support your new personal relationships as well as your health and wellness habit shifts.

#4 – Find a Meaningful Incentive

People don’t change until they have a good enough reason.

If you’re struggling to make new relationships stick, you need to dig deep into your heart and mind to find the meaningful internal motivation to change your life and achieve your goals.

If you’re sick and tired of being lonely, you have to remind yourself of this every time you want to stay at home and watch television at night instead of going out to social event where you might meet Mr. or Mrs. Right.

I discovered the power of a meaningful incentive through my weight loss transformation contests. Clients that entered based on financial incentives, like “buying themselves a new pair of jeans” if they lost 10 pounds, rarely stuck with the program. This simple financial incentive was not enough to keep them going through tough times. It just wasn’t meaningful enough.

The men and women that did stick with the program had a much more powerful incentive to change. They wrote about getting back in shape to keep up with their kids or to be healthy so they could live long enough to see their grandchildren. That was a much more effective incentive to make the changes needed to lose the weight and get back in shape.

You must put a big deadline in place for all behavior changes in life. You might need to set a deadline of asking five potential partners out on dates over the next 60 days, or maybe you need to attend twelve social events in the next twelve weeks with a big goal of meeting twelve new people. These are all action steps with deadlines.

You also need real consequences for not hitting your deadline. Perhaps for every missed social event you have to give $50 to a friend. The pain of missing your deadline and falling short on your actions must be great enough to spur you to action.

That’s why we run 12-week transformation contests at Turbulence Training. This deadline has inspired thousands of people to transform their bodies, and hundreds of men and women (from countries all over the world) have lost over twenty pounds in just twelve weeks.

The deadline gets you going, keeps you going, and makes you move faster towards your big goals in dreams.

These 5 Pillars are simple yet so powerful. With this structure in place, you’ll take more action than ever before and finally reach your goals, no matter what you want to change.

With the pillars in place you can make dramatic changes in every area of your life. You can use them in business to get wealthy or at work to get a raise. You can use the five pillars to lose weight, get back in shape, and dramatically change your body.

And, as clearly illustrated above, you can even find the love of your life, a new husband or wife, and live happily ever after.

Craig Ballantyne is the author of The Perfect Day Formula: How to Own the Day and Control Your Life. Craig has been a contributor to Men's Health magazine for over 17 years. Today he teaches his gift to high-performing entrepreneurs how to squeeze more out of their days, increase their income, and make more quality time for their families in his Perfect Life Workshop and Work-Life Mastery programs. Craig used his own advice to overcome crippling anxiety attacks in 2006, and he'll teach you his 5 Pillars of Success so you can increase your income, decrease your work time, and live the life of your dreams. Learn more about Craig at craigballantyne.com

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Early To Rise delivers science-based systems and structures to help people achieve a higher level of performance. We share proven strategies for success and help our readers steer clear of fads, gimmicks, and frauds and 10x their lives.